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One

Why Mother Teresa?

It seemed as if she had always been there, on the horizon of our awareness, part of the way things should be. There was Mother Teresa, on the covers of our magazines and the back of our minds, touching hearts and mending lives, turning the world upside down without trying. From all around the globe we watched, as her labor of love drew both rich and poor, believer and skeptic, into the shelter of God’s embrace.

We followed the unfolding of her life writ large across our newspapers. Her name had become a synonym for compassion and goodness, and she graced our daily lives, from conversations over coffee to sermons on Sunday. Her image added a note of goodness to the evening news, making a home for her not only in Calcutta, but in living rooms around the world. Effortlessly, almost without our noticing, she had made her way into our hearts. As the poor of the world clung to Mother Teresa’s sari, and the rulers of nations showered her with accolades, we watched — and in some deepest part of us, we understood. We saw in people all over the globe, and experienced within ourselves, the attraction of her small, humble frame and her vast, resplendent work.

She had become a living icon, a symbol of things better and nobler, a reminder of how we and our world could be. Through the humble portal of her work for the poor, the immense goodness of God poured forth on us all. She became a reflection of God’s glory in miniature, like the sun’s full radiance dazzling off a tiny shard of glass.

God had sent her to soften the rude landscape of human suffering. She would accomplish this by “being his light” and radiating his love, illuminating the darkness that descends on the bearers of unrelenting hardship.

The day it was announced that Mother Teresa of Calcutta had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I had just arrived on campus at Southern Illinois University, where I was chaplain. Within minutes of the announcement, I received a call from Mother Teresa’s Sisters in St. Louis, whom I had gotten to know during my chaplaincy. They were asking if I would come over to field questions from the newspaper and TV reporters who were gathering outside their convent. The reporters’ comments revealed their understanding, and even delight, at Mother Teresa’s nomination. They seemed genuinely intrigued that the prize winner had not been a president, scientist, or politician. For the first time, the Nobel Prize had been won by a diminutive, humble religious woman who worked obscurely in a third-world country. This disruption of the usual order had charmed the world and piqued their curiosity.

But as the days passed, while the world press lauded the Nobel Committee’s choice, the professional religious I knew kept asking, “But why Mother Teresa? Aren’t there others who do what she does, who serve the poor just as selflessly as she? Why such commotion over her?” An excellent question, I thought — and an important one.

The question brought to mind an episode from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. According to the thirteenth-century account, a certain pilgrim had been traversing the hills of Umbria in the hopes of meeting up with the young Francis. After weeks of searching, he finally found himself standing before a very ordinary looking man. Perplexed and disappointed, the young searcher looked intently at Francis and remarked, “Why is the whole world running after you?”

Indeed. Almost a thousand years later, we could ask the same question: Why was the whole world running after Mother Teresa? How do we explain the phenomenon of a Nobel Prize-winning, elderly Albanian nun, with no particular qualifications and no extraordinary talents? How do we account for her immense, seemingly universal impact? How do we explain the power of an attraction that only grew throughout her life, and continues still?

To answer the “why” of Mother Teresa’s power of attraction, and to understand her relevance in our post-modern world, we need to examine both her and ourselves more deeply. We need to ask what it was in her that moved us so, and what it was in us that responded so readily. What hidden chords of soul was she touching? What was God touching in us, through her?

Understanding what she touched in us is significant, since it points to and constitutes our common ground with her. The unnamed place that she awakened in us reveals an interior terrain, a sacred inner ground that we share with her — placed within us by the One who fashioned us for himself.

Is the same divinity that claimed such unrestricted space in her heart, there beneath the surface of our soul as well? If so, why do we not advert to it, or attend to it as she? Perhaps because, in the main, we inhabit but the surface of ourselves. And so we can be surprised at times by the power of our response to deeper things, to sudden incursions of the divine, to unexpected touches of grace.

For many of us, discovering Mother Teresa, watching her or hearing her speak, became just such an incursion of the divine. She became a portal and guide to our neglected realms of spirit — and to meeting the God who awaits us there.

How do we account for the phenomenon of Mother Teresa, for the impact and attraction she wielded, even among the agnostic and unchurched? What was her secret? What made her who she was? What formed and inspired her? What hidden inner fire motivated her and drew her on, in the most squalid conditions, to become the saint she was?

And what of ourselves? Can we become for others a source of the same kind of goodness we saw in her? Can her inner fire yield a similar light and warmth in us?

Answering these questions is the purpose of this book.

Thankfully, Mother Teresa has left clear and abundant clues — clues that allow us not only to understand, but to share in the secret of her goodness, in the secret of her transformation from ordinary schoolteacher, to Nobel laureate, to saint. For those who would wish to emulate her, her life and teachings are replete — as we will see in these pages — with signs that point the way to finding her same happiness, her same fulfillment, and her same union with the Almighty.

The riches of Mother Teresa’s example and teaching are more abundant than any single volume can hold (the documents used in her cause for sainthood comprise more than eighty volumes). While future volumes will explore other themes from her teaching, the scope of this book is limited to what Mother Teresa herself considered the core of her message.

This present volume is divided into three sections. The story of the inner fire that changed Mother Teresa’s life is told in this first section, “Fire in the Night.” The second section, “Illumination,” introduces the festival of light issuing from this inner fire, a light that illumined the face of God for her — and through her, for so many. The final section, “Transformation,” shows how her “consuming fire” within (Heb 12:29) changed a young and unsure Sister Teresa into Mother Teresa, and how it can transform us as well.

“Through the tender mercy of our God,

… the day shall dawn upon us from on high

to give light to those who sit in darkness and

in the shadow of death.”

— Luke 1:78-79